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Tri-County Schools address glitch in communication software

Wed, 04/04/2018 - 11:01Waushara1

Tri-County District Ad-ministrator Anthony Marinack addressed the members of the Tri-County Area School Board about the communication error that occurred when the District attempted to send a letter via email during the board’s regular meeting on March 27 at the District Office.

The letter sent out on March 22 alerted parents that the students were safe following a social media-related threat that was made the evening of March 21. The letter from 7-12 Principal Nicholas Marti informed parents of the school’s response to the threat.

During the public forum of the board meeting, Marinack addressed the situation that occurred after the mass email was sent out to parents. He expressed to the board and the community members in attendance that the District is currently running more tests to ensure the communication glitch does not happen again.

“On Friday (March 23) it came to our attention by several parents in our District who did not receive this letter. When we worked with our technology person on Friday we found out that when we sent it out via email to the family members of a home it would take the first family member, send to that email and didn’t look for any more,” explained Marinack. “That was a glitch on our part. We have since fixed that.”

According to Marinack, the District sent out a test email to the parents and community on March 27 and compared the report from the test on March 22.

“We ran another test (on March 27) and sent it to the parents in the community to try to rectify the situation,” he said. “The post that was sent out this morning, would have read something like this: ‘This is a test of our school messenger system. It was brought to our attention that on Friday, March 23, that communication information letter that was sent out via email to the parents on March 22 did not get to every email listed for our families. It only went to the first parent listed who had an email attached to that name. This was truly not intended and is since been rectified by our technology and information department. We are running this test to make sure we reach all families that we have contact information for. The school messenger system is generating a report of all receivers of the test so we can see if it is working properly.’”

After running the test on March 27, Marinack explained that the report came back stating they were able to reach more households than they had previously.

“We have to work on this more to make sure we are getting all our parents in our community, but that is a technology glitch,” he said. “We are continuing to work on that and we will probably run another test to make sure we’ve gotten that fixed.”